Nature, a walking play, is coming back to Concord! After receiving rave reviews when here in 2017 for Thoreau’s bicentennial, TigerLion Arts, in partnership with the Trustees, will bring their show back to The Old Manse!

Nature is the mythic telling of Emerson and Thoreau’s mutual love affair with the natural world. Grounded in the story of their friendship, this virtuosic production offers a perspective on their lives that is strikingly relevant, richly complex, and yet utterly simple. Participants follow the actors as the scenes unfold in the grassy meadows and native trees over a 90 minutes performance, which includes pre-event period bagpiping and choral music.

Following the 1 PM show on Saturday, September 21, the Walden Woods Project’s Director of Education, Whitney Retallic, will facilitate a post-show discussion.

We hope you will experience this incredible show and then join us for some inspired conversation!

For more information about all showtimes and purchasing tickets, click here.

Nature, a walking play, is coming back to Concord! After receiving rave reviews when here in 2017 for Thoreau’s bicentennial, TigerLion Arts, in partnership with the Trustees, will bring their show back to The Old Manse!

Nature is the mythic telling of Emerson and Thoreau’s mutual love affair with the natural world. Grounded in the story of their friendship, this virtuosic production offers a perspective on their lives that is strikingly relevant, richly complex, and yet utterly simple. Participants follow the actors as the scenes unfold in the grassy meadows and native trees over a 90 minutes performance, which includes pre-event period bagpiping and choral music.

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Public Program Catalog

These events are offered on an on-going basis. When an event is scheduled, it will appear in the list of upcoming event at the top of this page.

Stewardship Lectures

The Walden Woods Project’s Thoreau Institute sponsors the Stewardship Lecture Series to celebrate innovation and creativity in environmental stewardship and to highlight the work of those who are promoting the values and ideas embodied by Thoreau. Each year the series features a number of talks, panel discussions, or media presentations featuring individuals at the cutting edge of a renewed environmental and social justice movement.

Recent Stewardship Lectures include:

Terry Tempest Williams, on her book The Hours of Land: A Personal Topography of American National Parks.

Laura Dassow Walls, in October 2016, gave the first public presentation of her biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, due out on July 12, 2017

David Gessner, All the Wild that Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West (on his book of the same title)

Robert M. Thorson, Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth Century Science (on his book of the same title)

We are always seeking excellent candidates for the lecture series and welcome any nominations and suggestions for the upcoming year. If you have an idea for a topic or presenter for our Stewardship Lecture Series, please contact the Walden Woods Project.

Modern Lyceum

“Thoreau’s Legacy: A Modern Lyceum” brings back the movement that spawned adult education in America with public forums that promoted thoughtful conversation and education about the social, intellectual and ethical questions of 19th-Century society. Guided by accomplished scholars on related topics, our Modern Lyceum will engage the public in an investigation of current social issues, with respect to and through the lens of Henry David Thoreau’s still-poignant writings and actions—incorporating many of his contemporaries.

Our Lyceum events will not seek to provide easy answers to today’s dilemmas and debates, but to highlight the way in which the voices and perspectives of the past can shed light on and help us to critically examine our current situation. We anticipate that our panelists will—all drawing from Thoreau’s texts and actions—come to slightly different conclusions to some very complex questions, and by doing so, broaden our perspectives on events of today.

Read more about Henry David Thoreau’s involvement with the 19th-Century Lyceum Movement in the United States.